Joeski
Joe Flores was born in Brooklyn and raised in Corona, Queens, a short subway ride from the clubs that made New York the capital of house music in the late '80s and early '90s. He started DJing around 1989, and by 1991 he was booked at Wunder Bar in Manhattan. Over the next few years he became one of the founders of The Chocolate Factory and a regular in the city's big rooms: Limelight, Tunnel, Palladium and NASA.
Those were formative rooms to come up in. He played alongside DJ Keoki at the East Village after-hours spot Save the Robots, and took the Friday "Together" residency at the Roxy, sharing billing with Danny Tenaglia, Louie Vega and Roger Sanchez. His label bio adds an early residency at Groove Society in Montreal. That is a demanding education, and it shows in the way he plays: tough, percussive and driven by groove, with the New York instinct for keeping a big floor locked in for hours.
In the late '90s he built his own studio, and by 2000 he was putting out tracks and remixes on Siesta, Junior Boys Own, Ministry of Sound, Tango and Electrik Soul. In 2000 he launched Maya Recordings. Its first release, "Hustler's Revenge," set the tone, and the label became a vehicle for his blend of Latin-tinged percussion, tribal drums and deep, rolling basslines. Maya has since passed a hundred releases, and with Chus & Ceballos he made another of its big records, "El Amor."
He was part of the 6400 Crew circle with Onionz, Halo and Tony Hewitt, a bi-coastal network of friends that linked New York grit to West Coast funk. Since then he has produced and remixed for Defected, Bedrock, Cajual and Crosstown Rebels, worked with Sneaker Pimps, Dirty Vegas, DJ Sneak, John Creamer and Matthias Heilbronn, and held residencies in Barcelona and at Stereo in Montreal. He plays regularly in Greece, the UK, Portugal, Colombia and Mexico.
His records have a recognisable personality: hypnotic loops, horn stabs and vocal snippets worked into grooves that feel both raw and precise. He is a producer who understands that the simplest idea, filtered and repeated with enough conviction, can carry a whole room, and a DJ who knows exactly when to let it.
On Red Melon he made two records with Dano. The first, "Chikko," came with a "Keep On Moving" acapella. The second, "Twisted Horns," was cut as The Twisted Pair! and built around a filter-modulated horn stab, one of those riffs that sounds simple until you try to stop it. It remains one of the best-known records in the Red Melon catalogue.
For Red Melon, Joeski represents the New York side of a conversation the label has always been part of: the meeting of East Coast drive and West Coast funk on the same piece of wax. His records with Dano are a snapshot of that exchange at its best, and of a friendship built on a shared love of the groove.
